Supply chain planning applications develop production and distribution plans to attempt to match supply with demand to meet business objectives. Today supply chains are often extremely complex, including large networks of manufacturing facilities, distribution facilities, and sales channels spread around the world. As a result, a supply chain plan may include a large number of problems, such as late orders, short orders, overutilized or underutilized resources, safety stock violations, or other problems. It is typically the responsibility of a planner to minimize such problems by investigating their root causes and instituting corrective action.
Supply chain planning and other advanced planning system applications typically provide a “problem window” that presents problems in a given plan, which are typically categorized according to type and prioritized according to severity. However, there are several shortcomings associated with such applications. As an example, such applications may not account for the fact that problems may have lifecycles such that they repeatedly arise in successive planning cycles. As another example, such applications may not account for the fact that actions taken to correct such problems may similarly have effects in successive planning cycles. As another example, reconciling the results of a current plan with those of previous plans using such applications may require direct comparisons between stored plans, which are limited in their ability to give insight into the root causes of problems, particularly over long periods of time. As yet another example, such applications may provide no way to efficiently identify and prioritize critical root causes of problems across a supply chain. Previous approaches to dealing with these and other shortcomings include prioritizing and filtering problems and then working on the more important problems in a planning cycle and ignoring the less important problems, increasing time intervals between planning sessions to give planners more time to work on problems, and increasing the number of planners working on problems to allow for greater coverage. Such approaches are often inadequate.